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European iTMS not doing so well?

jholzner

jholzner

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jul 24, 2002
1,386
23
Champaign, IL
Does anyone else think that maybe they aren't exactly selling a ton of songs on the Euro store? I figured if it was a smash hit they would have a press release the day after or at least week after the announcement letting everyone know how many songs they sold. They did that for the US store when it launched and even after the release of iTunes 4.5. Just a thought. Hope it's doing great though...and they bring it to more places sooner.
 
I was thinking about that earlier. I'd say they are waiting for WWDC. I'm sure it had a bit of a slow start, but even Napster sold a few songs in the UK, and iTunes is cheaper!

If it was bad, Steve might just make a comment about iTunes doing well overall, and not really mention it with exact #s. I'm sure either way we'll know in a week, and I'm sure it'll pick-up in Oct. when the rest of Europe gets it.
 
While thats a valid point, I believe its really too early to judge the success of the service. Maybe they will wait until all of Europe is serviced before releasing any figures?
 
there is not yet "itms europe" available - it is only for uk/france/germany and although the three make a big market segment, it is not the europe. some marketing effort by apple is expected during the summer, naturally, but i guess they are saving something big for the euro store opening.

we'll see. but still, no euro itms yet.
 
I've been travelling around the country at work a lot since it's announcement, and too busy when I have got back home. Hence I have been unable to download a single song.

So if Apple want to blame me for the low volume, then they are well within their rights. I feel I have betrayed everyone at their company, their families and everyone here on the forums. :(
I'm sorry.


Taking the broad, and slightly more relevant, view, I think it will start slowly but pick up and flatten out at 200 thou a week downloads.
 
They haven't exactly helped themselves with a regularly broken frontpage ('You need to upgrade to the latest version of iTunes etc etc' - the correct message would be 'We're busy right now. Please try again later'), a woefull selection of tracks and nearly non-existant advertising. I work in London and have seen no posters and no TV ads. I've heard a few ads on XFM but that radio station plays mostly indie stuff and guess what there's very little of on iTMS UK????? I checked at the weekend and only ONE song on the radio station's playlist was on iTMS. ONE BLOODY SONG.

Apart from some good coverage on the news on the day of release there's been precious little reason for the general population to even download iTunes - let alone buy any songs (unless they have an ipod). My guess it's pretty much only mac users right now - and there aren't many of us here.

And yes....I've bought stuff....about a tenner actually. Most of it was older stuff. Nothing new.
 
caveman_uk said:
They haven't exactly helped themselves with a regularly broken frontpage ('You need to upgrade to the latest version of iTunes etc etc' - the correct message would be 'We're busy right now. Please try again later'), a woefull selection of tracks and nearly non-existant advertising. I work in London and have seen no posters and no TV ads.
Click to expand...

My iTMS has worked each time I went to the home page - no problems there. The track selection has continued to grow - I found some Elliott Smith that I'd been meaning to check out for a while this week.

I'm in London too (work in Chelsea) and there are ITMS/iPod ads on every other bus stop. I haven't seen any TV ads but then again, since I mainly watch the North American Sports Network, I'm not surprised!

I do think more Mac people will use it (and people not as net savvy about P2P like my Mum!) since when I mention it to PC people at work all they say is 'but why not just download it for free?' - and illegally
 
Apple just released a press release to say that 800,000 songs were downloaded in the first week. 450,000 were in the UK. In the US there was 1 million downloads in the first week. I don't think that is too bad for three smaller markets.
 
bidge said:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/may/05musicstore.html

This was the US iTunes press release after a week, seems like they were doing better but I don't know what the populations are like in the countries.

Over 1 million were sold in the US in the first week.
Click to expand...

The US is about 294 million and the populations of the three european countries combined is around 201 million. Mind you, Euro 2004 is on and half of England are currently in Portugal and are not sober enough to use their iBooks yet. That will lower the target audience a bit!!!
 
America = 293,027,571 (July 2004 est.)
UK = 60,270,708 (July 2004 est.)
Germany 82,424,609 (July 2004 est.)
France = 60,424,213 (July 2004 est.)
Europe = 203,119,530 (based on above)


Average song per person then is:
America: 0.004095177787894914
Europe: 0.003937016980305024


Not quite as good but similar, I guess we'll see how it all goes
 
hmm 450.000 downloads for uk looks good when there where only about the same for germany and france combined (which would be mroe than twice the size from population side)

for the "most users are mac users"... thing wasen'T there already statements by jobs that they sell more ipods and songs to windows users than to mac users ...

well lets wait for the rest of europe/EU

for the commercial topic: i haven't seen any tv commercials from apple _ever_ (and i watch german tv all the time) some european depandancies seriously need a kick in the...i mean moreadvertisment
 
Applespider said:
My iTMS has worked each time I went to the home page - no problems there. The track selection has continued to grow - I found some Elliott Smith that I'd been meaning to check out for a while this week.

I'm in London too (work in Chelsea) and there are ITMS/iPod ads on every other bus stop. I haven't seen any TV ads but then again, since I mainly watch the North American Sports Network, I'm not surprised!
Click to expand...
For me I get the dumb 'update iTunes' message about one in every two go's. It's got better in the last few days though. You can still search - it's just the front page that was foobar'd.

I go through Southwark, around Bank and Kings Cross station nearly every day and I haven't seen any ads yet. There were some for ipods at Kings Cross over Christmas but none at the moment.

450K is not bad for a country with very few mac users and very-little Apple awareness apart from the iPod
 
as soon as apple release the iPod mini and the new iPod's in europe is when they will see more ppl use the store i for one am waiting to buy a iPod mini.

uk 450k - glad i did my bit

tom
 
450k in one week for the UK alone is a HUGE figure ;)

Compare that to OD2 and the fact that a song can hit number 1 selling anywhere between 5000-20000 songs depending on the week and you really begin to realise just how popular iTunes UK Store has been. ;)

As for TV ad's.... I've lost count of how many times I've seen it... ;) heheh
 
I think Apple really need to give themselves a pat on the back. This number is excellent, and hopefully it will pick up some more as more songs are added.

for example - if you look at the UK itunes charts right now, they are more 'real' - having something like 5 darkness tracks in the top ten makes me ill!

bravo apple. i'm still looking for more songs to download :)
 
450k for the UK seems like a good figure to me, although the UK is historically a big music buyer (I have no figures for the amount of music we buy however, so maybe that is just a myth). I think its particularly good when you consider the lack of decent music on there, they really need to get more indies soon, the only music worth buying at the moment is older music and that can generally be bought cheap on CD anyway.

However that damn front page needs to be fixed, it really irritates me when I can't get to the store.
 
It's a superb showing. iTunes is crushing the competition. I just hope that sales remain high, but, as more people get them, and with the release of iPod mini, see this go up. New tracks are being released and more and more things seem to be going online in the store.

And the iTunes name seems to have something. Maybe, producers of portable players will start investigating AAC..
 
Sabbath said:
However that damn front page needs to be fixed, it really irritates me when I can't get to the store.
Click to expand...


Yeah, I know what you mean. If you want to get ont he front page though, you can go to browse, and double click on vocal. Becuase there is no 'real' page for vocal, it takes you to the front page..
 
If i remember correctly the figure for all UK download services this YEAR prior to the release of iTunes uk was 500,000.

That makes 450,000 for iTunes pretty spectacular especially as the up to date selection is currently quite poor.
 
asif786 said:
Yeah, I know what you mean. If you want to get ont he front page though, you can go to browse, and double click on vocal. Becuase there is no 'real' page for vocal, it takes you to the front page..
Click to expand...

Really good tip thanks. The front page seems a bit more reliable now too.
 
Anyone know how much effort Apple puts into advertisment in the different countries? And how that compares to the advertisment in the US a year ago?

There seems to be at least some advertisment in the U.K, so maybe that explains higher sales.

(I've never ever seen an Apple ad here in Norway either)
 
Has anyone else noticed how all the top rated iMixes (in the UK at least) are all complaints about the lack of indies, rather than actually good music.

I tired to upload one of my playlists to an iMix but none of the songs were available on iTMS!
 
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